I like the Monorale font: like Railway, but with some of the fancier bits removed.

I also like my webpages to be small, and also to host things myself (i.e. no CDN or third party font hosting).

Loading the index page of decoded.legal is 370kB. Not massive, by any means, but I wondered if it could be smaller.

Using the Monorale font adds an additional 140ish kB to each initial load of my site, per font. So multiplied by two when I use italics, three when I use bold, and so on.

-rw-r--r-- 1 neil neil 140544 2024-05-03 08:15 Monorale-Italic.otf
-rw-r--r-- 1 neil neil 143888 2024-05-03 08:15 Monorale-Regular.otf

So I wondered if I could strip out glyphs that I don’t use / am unlikely to use, and what the impact would be.

fonttools

I used:

pipx install fonttools

pyftsubset Monorale-Regular.otf --output-file=Monorale-Regular_reduced.otf --unicodes=U+0020-007E

As I understand it, this keeps only the basic Latin characters.

The reduction is quite significant:

-rw-r--r-- 1 neil neil  10064 2024-05-03 08:27 Monorale-Italic_reduced.otf
-rw-r--r-- 1 neil neil   9580 2024-05-03 08:26 Monorale-Regular_reduced.otf

Fonts would now account for 20kB, rather than 280kB.

Now, loading the index page of decoded.legal is 110kB, so over a third smaller.

I could perhaps trim off another 2 or 3kB by switching to .woff.

Is this a bad idea?

I don’t know!

I’ve had a quick (manual) look through the site, to see if there are any obvious font errors, and I haven’t seen any. It doesn’t mean that they are not there.

But, if it does work, amazing.

And if it does not, I can always revert, or try a different reduced set of glyphs.

So now if I could just trim down the 70kB of JavaScript (i.e. not having a drop-down menu) and css…

(I haven’t done my blogs yet; perhaps over the weekend.)